My presentation about Cascalog at Hadoop Summit 2010.

1. Cascalog: an Interactive Query
Language for Hadoop
Nathan Marz
BackType

2. What is Cascalog?
Cascading (the job execution engine)
+
Datalog (basis of the API design)
+
Clojure (the host programming language)

3. Why another query language for Hadoop?
Existing tools cause too much
Accidental Complexity

4. Accidental complexity
Complexity caused by the tool used
to solve a problem rather than the
problem itself

5. Accidental complexity in existing tools
Pig The query language is different
than the programming language
Hive

6. When query tool is separate from
programming language
 Friction when embedding custom operations
 Interlacing queries with regular application logic
is unnatural
 Generating queries dynamically is difficult

7. Clojure
 General purpose programming language
 Dialect of Lisp that compiles to Java bytecode
 “Programmable programming language”: Easy to
build Domain Specific Languages (DSL) in Clojure

8. Clojure examples
Clojure code Result
(+ 1 2 3) 6
(> 20 18) true
(defn incr [x] (+ 1 x)) 4
(incr 3)

9. Cascalog
Domain Specific Language in Clojure for
processing data using Hadoop

10. Cascalog
Full power of a general purpose
programming language available at all times

11. Cascalog
Full power of a general purpose
programming language available at all times
Cascalog is a Clojure library
Example query: (?<- (stdout) [?p ?a] (age ?p 25))

12. Demo time!

13. Some of Cascalog’s features
 Inner and outer joins
 Aggregators
 Functions
 Subqueries
 Sorting
 Read from and write to arbitrary data sources
› HDFS
› HBase
› MySQL
› Etc.

14. When query tool is separate from
programming language
 Friction when embedding custom operations
 Interlacing queries with regular application logic
is unnatural
 Generating queries dynamically is difficult

15. Cascalog, on the other hand...
 Custom operations defined just like any other
function
 Interlacing queries with regular application logic
is trivial
 Generating queries dynamically is easy and
idiomatic

16. Try Cascalog yourself!
Project Page
http://www.github.com/nathanmarz/cascalog
Introductory Tutorial
http://nathanmarz.com/blog/introducing-
cascalog/
5 minutes to install Clojure, Hadoop, and
Cascalog locally! See project README

17. Questions?
Twitter: @nathanmarz
Email: nathan.marz@gmail.com

18. More benefits to being Clojure DSL
 Excellent module system
 Interactive REPL
 Make use of any Clojure function in queries